Controlling conditions for growing plants in for example a greenhouse is of interest for optimizing plant growth. Conditions such as light, temperature, ambient water vapor pressure, CO2 partial pressure, etc may be monitored and controlled in order to optimize the growth environment for the plants. Careful monitoring of growth conditions and plant response is important in order to optimize the growth environment which, if carefully tuned, may stimulate photosynthesis in the plants. Ultimately, economic returns may be affected by the outcome of the control of the growth conditions.
Control of the growth conditions may be done by a feedback control system where a status of the plant is monitored and the conditions are adjusted according to a predefined desired status of the plants. The feedback systems may then have a more or less complicated control algorithm that controls the growth conditions according to predefined schemes.
An example of a plant growth modulating system is disclosed in WO2008118080, comprising a light sensor communicatively coupled to a processor, where the processor implements a control algorithm for modulating and improving plant growth and attributes by adjusting the light emitted by light-emitting diodes.
WO2008118080 shows a promising approach in relation to artificial lighting in a greenhouse environment, however, it would still be desirable to further optimize the growth cycle, to be able to improve the growth process of a plant.
In particular, it would be desirable to store growth information to understand how the optimal growth conditions for a plant vary at various stages of the growth cycle of the plant. Such understanding would be of extreme importance for optimizing plant growth, and would allow adaptive selection of the most suitable growth regime in every stage of the growth cycle. Such adaptive control using stored growth information would enable the growth modulating system to react to changes in the uncontrolled aspects of the environment, leading to a completely new generation of intelligent greenhouses.